Realization of Thematic Progression to Achieve Grammatical Cohesion in Students' Final Project Backgrounds

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INTRODUCTION
When it comes to education, learning a foreign language is one of the most critical tasks.English as a foreign language is one of the compulsory subjects for Indonesian students from junior high school to university.ESL learners may find it challenging to write a foreign language independently.Academic writing skills are necessary for academic performance in higher education.Abdulkareem (2013) explains that academic writing fundamentally impacts learners' progress in a second language.
Following the writing's form, the concept of writing tends to be the most challenging of the language skills in that it necessitates a lengthy phase that starts with brainstorming and finishes with the finished product.Creating a text in detail, consistently, and fluently is difficult for some students.Therefore, to solve the problems, the learner must make a conscious effort and practice well-organized language usage and writing skills.How to structure the texts are purposefully required among the students to achieve their academic title.In addition, the text that they carry out must be meaningfully organized; the readers easily get comprehensive messages (Yunita, 2018).
Therefore, this study explores the principles of cohesion and coherence that must be followed in any good piece of writing.In language studies, cohesion refers to the formal, particularly semantic, ties between one clause and another in forwarding or backward reference.When we use coherent relations, we know how a pronoun, a noun, or conjunction applies to another clause within a text in any dimension (forward or backward) (Tamunobelema, 2018).In other words, to build a coherent text, cohesion connects ideas (semantic relation) among sentences must be utilized (Afrianto, 2017).
The researcher used thematic progression analysis to achieve cohesion in this students' research project background.Thematic structure refers to how a clause or utterance of theme and rheme is arranged to form a message (Rahmawati & Kurniawan, 2017).
In analyzing this research's data, the theory proposed by Eggins (2004) and Gerot and Wignell (1994) was used.They propose three patterns as the taxonomy thematic progression tools to classify different Thematic progression patterns as follows: 1. Constant Theme Pattern, called "Theme Reiteration Pattern."A theme in the first clause is picked up and repeated at the beginning of the following clause, and the rest is Rheme.2. Linear Theme, called "Zig-Zag Theme Pattern."It happens when the point matter in the rheme of a clause is taken up and repeated to the theme of the following clause.3. Multiple Theme, called "Split Theme Pattern."It happens when the Rheme spreads out to some pieces of information, and each of them may be taken up as the new theme in some subsequent clauses.
In addition, the thematic progression in clauses was a method of forming themes and rhemes.In other words, thematic progression was a method or technique for improving the effectiveness of writing.
Thematic progression was also an essential feature of structural linguistic function.Thematic progression has been extensively researched in English over the last few years, demonstrating a critical component of writing (Syharizal et al., 2018), as well as Naderi and Koohestanian's (2014) research, opted to use a thematic framework to analyze Persian EFL scholars' conference papers in the scope of discussion that the thematic density was used to analyze how students structure a research article in 30 academic journals.,Farrokhi and Khalili (2016) analyze thematic progression patterns in a research article, and Farikah (2012) implements thematic progression patterns with a cooperative learning model to improve writing skills.The researcher might use the development of qualified students' writing backgrounds to extract the precision of thematic growth in attaining continuity and coherence, which was done or explored.Since this paradigm was good enough for its result, the method to gain cohesion and coherence was still not enough; the writer might serve the technique to support the theory.Then, the study conducted by Dahliana (2019) claimed that thematic progression, which was used in teaching writing wherein the students' texts, the analysis identifies both common and problematic thematic progression patterns.EFL students were more likely to use the constant theme pattern with less precision in longer paragraphs.Students had difficulty developing their concepts in the texts due to troubling trends.
On the other hand, this current study focused on analyzing grammatical cohesion, supported by the realization of thematic progression.Furthermore, thematic progression aims to construct a well-structured text.The connectedness between individual sentences that refer to each other indicates a well-structured text (Fatmawati et al., 2019).According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), grammatical cohesion is divided into four kinds as follows: 1. Reference, Halliday (1994) stated again that reference is "a participant or circumstantial element introduced at one place in the text can be taken as a reference point for something that follows." in revision, Halliday and Mattheissen (2014) divided reference into two kinds, coreference (personal and demonstrative) and comparative reference.2. Substitution is one of the grammatical cohesion which is not replicated or duplicated but instead substituted with a substitute object or alternative object; in other words, one item is replaced with another.There are three types of substitution; nominal substitution, verbal substitution, and clausal substitution.3. Ellipsis can be interpreted as that form of substitution in which the item is replaced by nothing (Halliday & Hasan, 1976).So, it can be concluded that an ellipsis is an omission of an object.There are three types of ellipsis; nominal, verbal, and causal ellipsis.4. Conjunction refers to "how the writer creates and expresses logical relationships between the parts of a text" (Eggins, 2004).
This research is developed from the following research problems; How is a constant theme, linear theme, multiple-theme applied in the background of the studies section of students' final project proposal, and how does thematic progression function to achieve cohesion in the background of the studies section of students' final project proposal.This research focuses on the background of the study because it serves as context for the facts addressed throughout the research report, which the investigation will provide.
This research looked into how to increase the coherence in students' meta-backgrounds of writing to improve writing efficiency and proposed using theme and thematic progression as a significant aspect of how the researchers create the message meaningfully to enhance the text's coherence.According to Kuswoyo and Susardi (2017), a good piece of writing must fulfill the principle of cohesion and coherence.This research theoretically presented the idea of thematic progression to expand the knowledge in the texts in greater depth.According to the results, most of the students knew how knowledge or ideas could flow expressively in the text.The study's effects could also impact English college students' ability to compose a coherent academic paper.This study model is crucial in assisting many university students in completing the requirement.This research's outcome also contributes to paragraphing coherent texts, the importance of this model provides several benefits to being a premier prototype in teaching writing.In other words, this model has the potential to be a successful teaching method for directing students to begin writing correctly.

METHOD
This research is intended for qualitative research.Academic manuscripts were used to select and collect information about student writing and transform ideas into messages in many sections; it was adapted from students' study backgrounds in the research project.A purposive sampling technique was used to select the subject of the study.The data source was taken from 15 manuscripts of research project proposals written by the Undergraduate students of the English Education of UIN Walisongo Semarang in the Academic Year 2020/2021.This institution has a lot of academic majors; one of them is the English Education Department which is one of the official institutions where this gives a chance for some colleagues to learn a way to improve their English.There are some steps to analyze the data; firstly, the text should be located and numbered by each clause.Secondly, the theme and rheme should be identified by each category of thematic progression.Next, the types of thematic progression were tabulated in a table for each text.Lastly, count the distribution of thematic progression into grammatical cohesion and calculate the total number of thematic progression for each text.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Many scientific journals or articles provided non-numerical data for research questions and discussed the thematic progression functions.Besides, there were three types of thematic progression patterns; constant theme pattern, linear theme pattern, and multiple theme pattern that functionally was applied in certain documents of the final project.Table 1 shows the findings of the number of occurrences of each thematic progression pattern, and its' percentage is displayed as follows.According to table 1, thematic progression patterns are applied to the final project background.There were 282 thematic progression patterns on 15 final project backgrounds found.The result could sum up that the use of a constant theme pattern became the primarily first applied pattern on students' final project background, with a total number of occurrences 168 times (59%).Linear theme pattern became the second most applied pattern on students' final project background, with the total number of occurrences 108 (39%).Moreover, the last mostly applied pattern on students' final project background was the Multiple theme pattern with a total number of occurrences of 6 (2%).
This result differed from Adawiyah (2017), which analyzed the thematic progression of 12 academic essays of undergraduate students.She found that the most pattern applied was the linear theme pattern, with occurrences of 50%.It was in line with Marfuaty and Wahyudi's study (2015).Nevertheless, Rakhman (2013) also found that the constant theme pattern became the most applied pattern.The linear theme was considered more difficult since the matter in the rheme of one clause was taken up as the theme of the following clause (Rustipa, 2010).The sample distributed in table 3 was the type of constant theme that occurred in text 5. Typically, the researchers found the text with some changes where the first clause, the students chose the word "the Covid-19 Pandemic" then substituted it with the demonstrative pronoun "this pandemic."Then, the term "technology" in clause 13 referred to the personal pronoun "it" in clause 14.The finding was not different among those clauses when the focus was on their track.Again, they were the case of the constant theme.
The constant theme pattern is the most applied pattern within the fifteen texts.It is considered the easiest pattern than linear theme and Multiple-theme.This result is in line with Gunawan and Aziza (2017).They state that the constant theme is dominant to produce a sense of cohesiveness in the text.Soepriatmadji (2009) added that it is characterized as the most tedious pattern in developing a paragraph.4 above shows that the number of the linear themes was 108 times.The highest occurrence of linear theme occurs in text 7, whereas the students in text three did not write the function of the linear theme correctly; it was once.Linear theme pattern became the second most applied in this research with 39% occurrence.It is in line with Rahmawati and Kurniawan (2015).They state that a lack of linear theme may indicate that text does not hang together.In contrast, it is important to use linear theme in academic research because this is how the writing has a consistent flow of information and provides a logical relationship between their writing (Lifah et al., 2020).The result is also in line with Undayasari and Saleh (2018).They compared the thematic progression pattern between English and Indonesian exposition texts written by Undergraduate Students of UPI.Their result shows that the students used the zig-zag theme pattern as much as reiteration theme pattern to maintain the focus and reinforce the arguments in their texts.An example of a multiple-theme pattern occurred in text eight.
The instance of linear theme pattern occurred in text 5 below.

Is smartphone appication
The rheme of clause 6, which was "students," refers to personal pronoun "they" as a new theme in clause 7. Next, the rheme of clause 19, which was talking about the media of WhatsApp, was linearly organized with the personal pronoun "it,"; which indicated cohesion since each idea was connected to unify the message.Linear theme connects adjacent clauses through their respective rhemes (Hawes, 2015).
Nevertheless, this result is different from Yani et al. (2019).It reveals that the linear theme was higher than others because the writer can create information flow between the clauses.The samples of the units of multiple themes found some occurrences within the final projects in table 6.Based on table 6, the occurrences of multiple themes only existed in text 3 (2 times), 5 (1 time), 8 (1 time), 9 (1 time), and 12 (1 time), and their amount was six times for among documents.By using multiple-theme, the writer should make the rheme of the clause contain some information that would be elaborated in the following clause (Yani et al., 2019).According to Susilowati et al. ( 2022), a multiple-rheme pattern brings a new insight or discovery in the relevant research field.According to the sample in table 7, the student was eager to use multiple-theme to aid in developing the idea into certain places of themes; the word "the first, the second, and in addition" signified the extension of rheme in clause 42.This pattern is used to distinguish between themes from different parts of the same rheme to reassure the reader that the topic is further developed (Muroda et al., 2017).
Provide the contribution of the thematic progression function to grammatical cohesion, and this research displayed numerous samples of how thematic progression featured in composing the research project proposal contributed to grammatical cohesion.

Table 8. Thematic Progression Contributions To Grammatical Cohesion
Table 8 presents the number of references applied to the 15 texts.The highest number of reference occurs in text 9, and the lowest number occurs in text 13.Conjunction was used one time on text 8, and substitution occured five times on text 3 (1 time), text 4 (1 time), text 7 (1 time), text 8 (1 time), and text 13 (1 time) respectively.Besides that, ellipsis did not apply to 15 texts.
According to the findings, numerous grammatical cohesion occurrences were achieved through the technique of thematic progression, such as grammatical reference and grammatical substitution.In contrast, the service of grammatical conjunction and ellipsis seemed unfunctional to be written in this case since those samples didn't work properly.It was in line with Fitriati (2017).She examined the coherence of Argumentative text from Graduate Students.She said that lacking optimization of conjunction is weak in achieving coherent text.Besides, grammatical cohesion that linked extra clausal messages implied the unity of text and the employment of thematization.The writer can add their knowledge about the theory of creating the coherence text by concerning the system of theme and rheme (Astuti, 2010).Furthermore, the theme-rheme relationship and thematic development are vitally significant in analyzing text coherence and cohesion because they act as cohesion links that connect the text's global flows of themes.Through the analysis of thematic progression and of sense relations within each sentence, the cohesion and coherence of the text is obvious and the development of the text is also transparent (Zhang, 2016).
This study was replicated since the writer was motivated to perform the analysis using the method of thematic progression to gain cohesiveness within the communications, even though this result was different from the previous research.

CONCLUSIONS
The first conclusion synthesized that the realization of the constant theme was the easiest pattern of thematization.It was applied by the students to organize the final projects; that was not hard because the form of the constant theme was just repeated, replaced, substituted, or changed some non-numeral description into a similar way to a clause.This way functioned certain themes for its preceding rheme, which meant the realization of the linear theme seemed medium since the students were required to renew, explain, or describe what the rheme discussed.The second conclusion was about the contribution of thematic progression to the function of grammatical cohesion.It could be

Table 1 .
The Number of Occurrence of Thematic Progression Pattern in the Background of Final

Table 2 .
Realization of Constant Theme Pattern in the Background of the Final Project Proposal

Table 4 .
Realization of Linear Theme Pattern in the Background of the Final Project Proposal

Table 5 .
The Example Analysis of Linear Theme

Table 6 .
Realization of Multiple-Theme Pattern in the Background of the Final Project Proposal

Table 7 .
he Example Analysis of Multiple-Theme function of thematization to detect or achieve grammatical cohesion supported the concept of cohesion of the text.In detail, both grammatical reference and substitution were in this field achieved by the thematic progression since the students were aware that those samples were functional.In contrast, neither grammatical conjunction nor ellipsis employed to expand or enlarge the ideas within clauses because their type of clause did not give support.This research contributes to helping the students write or organize their academic papers or documents.So they should have to pay attention to the service of cohesion and coherence.Cohesion describes how the sentences in a text relate to one another.Grammatical and lexical cohesion are examples of cohesive devices.References, conjunctions, ellipses, and substitutions are also grammatical continuity devices(Farida & Rosyidi, 2019).